The Wrong Man (55 page)

The assistant dean of the Art History Department only had a few moments, she told me. It was her regularly scheduled office hours, and there was usually a backlog of students outside her door. She grinned as she outlined the panoply of student excuses, complaints, inquiries, and criticisms that awaited her that day.

“So,” she said, leaning back in her chair, “what is it that has brought an actual adult to my door this day?”

I explained, in the vaguest terms I thought would manage to keep her talking, what I was interested in.

“Ashley?” she said. “Yes. I do remember her. A few years ago, no? A most curious case, that one.”

“How so?”

“Excellent undergraduate grades, a real artistic streak, a hard worker—she had an excellent part-time position at the museum—and then it all seemed to fall apart for her in a most dramatic fashion. I always suspected some sort of boy trouble. Usually that’s the case when promising young women suddenly go into a tailspin. In most cases, these sorts of problems can be solved with copious amounts of tissue for the tears, and several cups of hot tea. In her case, however, there was all sorts of talk, rumors mostly, throughout the department, about how she got fired from that job, and the integrity of her academic work. But I’m not comfortable speaking about these things without her authorization. In writing. You don’t by any chance have a document such as that with you, do you?”

“No.”

The dean shrugged, a small, wry smile on her lips. “I am limited then in what I can tell you.”

“Of course.” I got up to leave. “Still, thanks for your time.”

“Say,” the dean asked, “maybe you can tell me what happened to her? She seems to have dropped off our radar completely.”

I hesitated, not exactly sure how to answer her question. The pause caused the dean to look up in concern.

“Did something happen to her?” she asked, suddenly all jocularity vanishing from her tones. “I would hate to hear that.”

“Yes, I suppose you could say something did happen to her.”

37

An Enlightening Conversation

S
cott emerged slowly from his car, staring at the man he knew was O’Connell’s father. The father brandished the ax handle menacingly. Scott stepped back out of the weapon’s reach and took a deep breath, wondering why he oddly felt so calm. “I’m not sure you want to be threatening me with that, Mr. O’Connell.”

The older O’Connell twitched and grunted, “You’ve been up and down this neighborhood asking about me. So I’ll put it down when you tell me who you are.”

Scott fixed his eyes on the father’s. He narrowed his gaze, remained silent, poker-faced, until the man said, “I’m waiting for an answer.”

“I know you are. I’m just wondering what sort of answer you’re going to get.”

This confused O’Connell’s father. He stepped back, then forward again, lifting the ax handle as he repeated, “Who are you?”

Scott continued to stare, slowly looking O’Connell senior up and down, as if he had absolutely nothing to fear from the ax handle aimed at his head. The man’s build was both soft and hard—beer belly hanging over his stained jeans, thick, muscled arms sporting a variety of entwined tattoos. He wore only a black T-shirt with the Harley-Davidson logo above his jeans and boots, seemingly oblivious to the cold November air. His dark hair was streaked with gray, cropped close to his head. A tattoo with the name
Lucy
prominently displayed on his forearm was probably all that remained of his marriage, other than his son and the house. Scott thought the man had probably been drinking, but his words weren’t slurred, nor was his step unsteady. He had probably drunk just enough to loosen inhibitions and cloud his thinking, which, Scott hoped, was a good thing. He slowly folded his arms and shook his head at O’Connell, a motion to underscore the idea that he was in charge of the situation. “I could be more trouble than you’ve ever seen. And I mean the worst sort of trouble, Mr. O’Connell. The kind of trouble that has significant pain attached to it. On the other hand, I could also be a big help to you. That would be an opportunity to make some money. Which is it going to be?”

The ax handle came down partway.

“Keep talking.”

Scott shook his head. He was making things up as he went along.

“I don’t negotiate on the street, Mr. O’Connell. And the man I represent surely wouldn’t want me spilling his business all over the place where anyone might take notice of it.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“Let’s go inside your place, and then we can have a little private conversation. Otherwise, I’m going to get back in my car, and you will never see me again. But you might be visited by someone else. And that someone, or even a couple of someones, Mr. O’Connell, I assure you, will not be nearly as reasonable as I am. Their sort of negotiation is significantly different from mine.”

Scott thought O’Connell had probably spent much of his life either making threats or receiving them, and so this was all a language the man was likely to understand.

“What did you say your name was?” O’Connell asked.

“I didn’t say. And I’m not likely to, either.”

O’Connell hesitated, the ax handle dropping farther.

“What’s this about?” he demanded. But the tone his words carried contained some interest.

“A debt. But that’s all I’m saying right now. This could be valuable for you. Make some money. Or not. Up to you.”

“Why would you pay me anything?”

“Because it is always easier to pay someone than the alternative.” Scott let O’Connell’s father mull over what
the alternative
might mean.

Again, O’Connell’s father paused, then the ax handle swung down to his side. “All right. I’m not buying any of this bullshit. Not yet. But you can come inside. Tell me what this is all about. Make your pitch, whatever it is.”

And with that, he gestured across the street to his home, using the ax handle to direct their path.

There is a place in the woods beyond the dirt road that parallels the Westfield River, below a spot called the Chesterfield Gorge, where either side of the stream is protected by sixty-foot-high sheets of gray rock, carved by some prehistoric seismic shift, that is favored in the colder months by hunters, and in warmer times by fishermen. In the hottest days of summer, Ashley and her friends would sneak up to the river and go skinny-dipping in the cool pools.

“I think you should use both hands,” Catherine said sternly. “Steady the weapon in your right hand, grip them both with your left, take aim, and then pull the trigger.”

Ashley moved her feet slightly apart, cupped her left hand over her right, and tightened her muscles, feeling the trigger with her index finger. “Here goes,” she said quietly.

She pulled the trigger and the gun bucked in her hand. The shot resounded through the forest, and a piece of tree bark splintered off the oak she had aimed at.

“Wow. I can feel it tingle right through my forearm.”

Catherine nodded. “I think what you want, dear, is to pull the trigger five or six times, while you are holding the gun steady, so that all six shots will be clustered together. Can you do that?”

“It feels like it wants to jump around. Go all over the place. Almost like it’s alive.”

“I guess you could say that it has a personality all its own.”

Ashley nodded, and Catherine added, “And not a particularly nice one.”

“Let me try again.”

Again she assumed the firing position, and this time tightened her left hand’s grip to steady herself. “Here we go.”

She fired the remaining five shots. Three hit the tree trunk, spaced about two or three feet apart. The other two spun off into the forest. She could hear them whistling into oblivion, snapping through branches and the few remaining low-hanging leaves. The sound of the gun echoed in the bare trees around them and filled her ears. She let out a long, slow whistle of breath.

“Don’t close your eyes,” Catherine said.

“I think I should try again.”

Ashley clicked open the cylinder and dropped the spent shells on the pine-needle floor. She slowly took another half dozen bullets and loaded them into the weapon. “Only going to use this thing one time.”

“Yes. True enough. And only then if you really have to.”

“That’s right.” Ashley turned and took aim at the tree trunk once again. “Only if I really have to.”

“If you have no choice.”

“If I have no choice.”

Both of them had much to say about that, but didn’t actually want to use the words out loud, not even in the silent anonymity of the forest.

Scott moved slowly up the half-gravel, half-dirt driveway that led to O’Connell’s house, a distance of perhaps thirty yards from the quiet street. It was a single-story, white-framed building, with a battered television antenna hanging from the roof like a bird’s broken wing, next to a newer, gray satellite dish. In the front yard, a faded red Toyota was missing one door, one wheel up on a cinder block. Large brown rust stains marred the sheet-metal surface. There was also a newer black pickup truck, parked by a side door, partway beneath a flat roof constructed out of a single sheet of corrugated plastic. The roof made the space into a carport, but it was littered with a beaten red snowblower and a snowmobile missing its treadmill. As Scott walked past the pickup, he noticed an aluminum ladder, a wooden tool kit, and some roofing materials had been thrown haphazardly in the bed. O’Connell was pointing him toward the side door, but Scott noted a main entrance in the front. He doubted it was used much.

Probably a back entrance, he thought. Check to make sure.

“Through there. Don’t mind the mess. I wasn’t expecting company,” O’Connell’s father said gruffly.

Scott let himself in the aluminum screen door, then through a second, solid-wood door, into a small kitchen.
Mess
was an accurate description. Pizza boxes. Microwavable dinners. Three cases of Coors Light in silver boxes. A bottle of Johnnie Walker Black Label on the table to accompany the array of cans.

“Let’s go into the living room. We can have a seat, Mr.—okay, Mr. whatever your name is. What should I call you?”

“Smith works,” Scott said. “And if you have trouble keeping that straight, Jones will do just as well.”

O’Connell’s father snorted a small laugh.

“Okay, Mr. Smith or Mr. Jones. Now that I’ve invited you in here, why don’t you sit right over there where I can keep an eye on you, and you can explain yourself nice and quick, so that I don’t go back to thinking that my friend the ax handle is the better way of dealing with you. And you might get to the how-I-make-some-money part real quick. You want a beer?”

Scott walked into a small living room. There was a threadbare sofa, a recliner with a large red-and-white cooler next to it that served as a table, across from an oversize television set. Newspapers and pornographic magazines littered the floor, along with piles of grocery-store circulars and catalogs from various hunting stores. On one wall there was a stuffed deer head, which stared out blankly from behind glass eyes. A T-shirt hung from one of its antlers. He tried to imagine the house when O’Connell had been growing up here, and he could see in its bones the potential for a kind of normalcy. Get the debris out of the yard. Remove the interior clutter, fix up the couch. Replace the chairs. Hang a couple of posters on the walls, and spruce everything up with paint, and it would have been almost acceptable. The random piles of litter told him much about the father and little about the son; O’Connell’s father had probably replaced his dead wife and absent son with much of the mess.

Scott slid into a chair that creaked and threatened to give way and turned toward O’Connell’s father.

“I’ve been asking questions because your son has something that belongs to the person I represent. My client would like it back.”

“You a lawyer, then?”

Scott shrugged.

O’Connell slipped into the lounge chair, but kept the ax handle in his lap. “Who might this boss of yours be?”

Scott shook his head. “Names are really irrelevant to this conversation.”

“Okay, then, Mr. Smith. Then tell me what he does for a living.”

Scott smiled, as evil a grin as he could muster. “My client makes a great deal of money.”

“Legally or illegally?”

“I’m unsure whether you want to ask that question, Mr. O’Connell. And I would probably lie anyway, if I were going to respond.” Scott listened to the words tumbling out of his mouth, almost shocked at the ease he felt in inventing a character, a situation, and leading the older O’Connell on. Greed, he thought, is a powerful drug.

O’Connell smiled. “So, you’d like to get in touch with my wayward kid, huh? Can’t find him in the city?”

“No. He seems to have disappeared.”

“And you come snooping around here.”

“Just one of a number of possibilities.”

“My kid don’t like it here.”

Scott raised his hand, cutting O’Connell’s father off. “Let’s get past the obvious,” he said stiffly. “Can you help us find your son?”